The FAUST project will develop machine translation (MT) systems which respond rapidly and intelligently to user feedback. Current web-based MT systems provide high-volume translation with little real interaction. Most systems provide no opportunity for users to offer opinions or corrections for translation results. Other systems ask users for feedback on translation, however the user does not see any benefit to providing feedback: the translation does not change in response to the feedback. Our goal is to develop high-volume translation systems capable of adapting to user feedback in real-time.

We will build on the current leading commercial statistical MT systems developed by Language Weaver and deployed by Softissimo Inc at http://www.reverso.net. Our research will be based on translation in five bidirectional language pairs in these EU official languages:

We will also study translation from Arabic and Chinese into English. The systems we develop will be used directly by users at the http://www.reverso.net website. We will develop novel feedback collection mechanisms which encourage users to interact with the systems and to provide feedback. In this way we will collect the data, in the form of user judgements of translation quality and feedback for translation correction, which will guide our research.

Project objectives:

Enhance the high-volume, Reverso.net translation website with an experimental and evaluation infrastructure that will enable the study of instantaneous user feedback in MT.

Deploy novel web-oriented, feedback collection mechanisms that reduce noise in feedback provided by users and increase the utility of the web contributions.